Consultancy

At the tactical end of the spectrum the School has a highly respected professional consultancy company, ECS Partners Ltd. It engages in short-term projects which can range from a single day of an academic’s time through to a short duration research project involving a team of research staff. Many projects can be undertaken on a fixed price basis. The work has full access to research facilities and costs are recovered on a full economic cost basis.

Through ECS Partners Ltd, we have helped clients develop improvements throughout their business operations, from leading-edge research through to protecting their established business revenues from competitive actions. We work with a broad range of organizations, from the smallest enterprises to many of the FTSE 100 and global companies.

Consultancy projects have involved: marketing, corporate strategy, time-to-market, revenue/product protection, investment decisions, pre-competitive research.

Examples of our recent engagements with clients:

• Marketing - a client wanted to vitalise their core offering and to represent it as a leading edge and exciting brand. The project provided a state of the art face recognition capability to demonstrate potential new product offerings to the client's customers.

• Corporate Strategy - developed a strategic intelligence capability to monitor information on the internet to understand the impacts on key business drivers.

• Time to market - provided technology transfer and new product prototype to product organisation for evaluation with client's customers to validate market potential for new offering.

• Revenue/Product protection - working with client's legal team to investigate potential patent infringements by third parties.

• Investment decisions - provided technical due diligence for business investment cases, verifying claims and giving independent assessment on issues such as novel process or product.

• Pre-competitive research - developed basic research for an industry consortium at a stage prior to competitive product development, helping to reduce consortium members research costs.

To find out more contact ecspartners@ecs.soton.ac.uk